social networks

From the social network and web 2.0 perspective, the 80% of the poker league consists of the poker community and 20% of the social network as the players are related both as colleagues and as competitors. The league is based on the achievement process – people must complete various tasks, get points and rank in the leaderboards. The interaction between players forms a social network – they communicate in the forum, update their status, use the internal messaging, write blogs, upload pictures and videos to share their experience and educate the newbies.

PokerDIY is a little bit different from the social network point of view. It provides much more web 2.0 tools than any other poker social network. As the RSS widget is no longer the 8th miracle of the Word, the poker league Facebook application and the iPhone app are definitely worth your attention as they are the first ones in the market. Blogging is not so important at this rather old poker social network, but people still post. There is always a member who has something to say to their peers and to the community.

Do you still have doubts on where to start your poker blog? This article will introduce you to some of the most popular poker blogging platforms. In my first Poker Blog Engines article I have started analyzing poker social networks and blogging engines built exclusively for writing poker blogs. The rating system was based on 10 key points and their evaluation in a 5 grade scale. To remain objective and righteous I shall continue with the same 10 principles:

Visibility to the non-members of the blogging platform

The editing of the text + embedding external media (YouTube or any other video, flash replayer etc.) options

Tools to customize the design and the looks of the blog

Possibility to manage the URI (the ending of the link) of a single blog post

When you participate in a social network or a poker community you expect to be noticed. I got noticed immediately after posting my first blog at Railbirds.com – one of the fastest developing social networks. A few comments to my "hello, this is me" type of blog were posted in just half an hour. In the next half my blog had disappeared from the general list as more and more blogs kept coming in. And they were all about playing poker and personal poker experience. And not just 1 or 2 sentences, no spam, no affiliate links. That’s why I was amazed by the blogging service in Railbirds. Need some numbers? I have counted 188 blog posts written in August 11th, Tuesday.

This article is dedicated to webmasters who run or would like to run a poker site with no big investments. Usually creating a good website costs a lot of effort, time, energy and money. The logo and the design is one part of a job. Another one is programming and support. Let’s cut the programming expenses by using some free tools. Let’s decrease the design costs by using numerous free designer tools. Cutting the expenses for support service could be difficult, unless the visitors would come just out of nowhere. It is obvious that at the beginning stage of the website's existence the traffic would be a big problem.

Therefore one of the easiest ways to get visitors is to create a community-based website with people who are already involved in some other similar communities. This can be done with Ning - the online service that helps create your own social network. The best thing is that it can be done by anyone, no matter if it is going to be a network for people from a particular country, or just a close circle of home gamers.

Recently I have started investigating Poker Social Networks. I have started some topics on the major poker forums, such as 2+2, FullContact, Pocketfives asking people what poker social networks did they know. Although these threads were deleted rather quickly (people started advertising their websites even though they were not social networks at all), some answers made me worried.

It seems that people do not understand what a poker social network is.

I would like to explain it in a simple manner. Let’s start from the definition of a social network. According to Wikipedia a social network is

…a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.

If you are a poker player and would like to start your own blog to share your experience and views about the poker world, you'll have to decide on the essential issue – whether to use a general blogging platform such as Wordpress, Blogger.com, Tumblr.com, or a poker community blogging engine. Those who have decided to go with Wordpress or Blogger, please read this article just to make sure you know what you're missing and is it worth it.

Web 2.0 is about sharing the user created content. What content is the most popular in poker 2.0 realm? Pictures with poker buddies, screenshots of tournament winnings, blog posts on how the poker room is rigged :) and, of course, poker hands. The bad beat or a good hand can create a very active discussion and make the player known and popular if he had played some online poker pro. Web 2.0 is not only about creating the content, but also about sharing it. If you post a hand log to your favorite forum, it will not count as web 2.0 as forums are virtual communities and not social networks.

At the beginning you should decide what information about poker you want to get. Is it rules, strategy articles teaching you how to act in one game or another, stakes and situation? Maybe you are looking for poker "thriller" videos from live tournaments when people play with royal flushes and still build a breathtaking tension at the table. Maybe you're interested in strategy videos that in most cases are the paid ones and analyze online games? Maybe you just need some gossip about the stars playing poker or the poker pros? Want to check the bad beats, good hands and learn from the mistakes of the real online poker players? There is plenty of information which can be found in one place or scattered at some undiscovered locations.

The internet trends of recent years are going WEB 2.0. What is WEB 2.0? You can read about it in Wikipedia or you may follow this article where I will try to explain it in my own words. WEB 2.0 is the part of internet content submitted by ordinary people rather than paid journalists, public relations agents, copywriters or scholars. People submit such information as comments, Tweets, pictures, videos, PowerPoint presentations, their own writings in PDF format, blogs, diaries, interesting links that they share etc. Web 2.0 is not only about creating information. It is also about delivering it to the reader's eyes. People may now access information not only from search engines, but also from RSS feeds, Email subscriptions, Twitter followers and friends who share their links on Delicious or Digg. People can receive information and spread it to others using badges (Twitter badge, Flickr recent photos badge etc.) and applications in various social networks. Facebook, mySpace, LinkedIn are the perfect places for sharing the information created in Blogger, Wordpress or found via Delicious, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz, Digg etc.

This blog is named Poker 2.0. Why? I am going to write about social networks and poker, because people submit so much unique information about their passion - hand transcripts, screenshots of their winings at the online poker rooms, bad beats, photos from their home games, mobile photos and videos from poker tournaments (some of them can be illegal and shot from the sleeve). There are so many poker pros who share their experience in blogs or videoblogs. Some of them have even launched a webTV or a series of coaching videos. The internet is full of dramatic poker videos from live tournaments and funny collages of the most popular poker players. This variety of information is scattered around so I will try to collect the most interesting pieces.